OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Training Flexible Depth Model by Multi-Task Learning for Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The standard neural machine translation model can only decode with the same depth configuration as training. Restricted by this feature, we have to deploy models of various sizes to maintain the same translation latency, because the hardware conditions on different terminal devices (e.g., mobile phones) may vary greatly. Such individual training leads to increased model maintenance costs and slower model iterations, especially for the industry. In this work, we propose to use multi-task learning to train a flexible depth model that can adapt to different depth configurations during inference. Experimental results show that our approach can simultaneously support decoding in 24 depth configurations and is superior to the individual training and another flexible depth model training method -- LayerDrop.
Effective Distributed Representations for Academic Expert Search
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Expert search aims to find and rank experts based on a user's query. In academia, retrieving experts is an efficient way to navigate through a large amount of academic knowledge. Here, we study how different distributed representations of academic papers (i.e. embeddings) impact academic expert retrieval. We use the Microsoft Academic Graph dataset and experiment with different configurations of a document-centric voting model for retrieval. In particular, we explore the impact of the use of contextualized embeddings on search performance. We also present results for paper embeddings that incorporate citation information through retrofitting. Additionally, experiments are conducted using different techniques for assigning author weights based on author order. We observe that using contextual embeddings produced by a transformer model trained for sentence similarity tasks produces the most effective paper representations for document-centric expert retrieval. However, retrofitting the paper embeddings and using elaborate author contribution weighting strategies did not improve retrieval performance.
Multi-Shard Private Transactions for Permissioned Blockchains
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Traditionally, blockchain systems involve sharing transaction information across all blockchain network participants. Clearly, this introduces barriers to the adoption of the technology by the enterprise world, where preserving the privacy of the business data is a necessity. Previous efforts to bring privacy and blockchains together either still leak partial information, are restricted in their functionality or use costly mechanisms like zk-SNARKs. In this paper, we propose the Multi-Shard Private Transaction (MSPT) protocol, a novel privacy-preserving protocol for permissioned blockchains, which relies only on simple cryptographic primitives and targeted dissemination of information to achieve atomicity and high performances.
Edge-enabled Optimized Network Slicing in Large Scale Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

In this demo paper, we consider the network slice placement optimization problem and give some insights into a fast heuristic algorithm tailored to placement in large scale networks. We consider an online optimization scenario with multiple and volatile network slice request arrivals and we showcase the applicability of the proposed Edge-enabled network slice placement solution through a Proof-of-Concept illustrated by large scale networks scenarios.
Detecting ESG topics using domain-specific language models and data augmentation approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Despite recent advances in deep learning-based language modelling, many natural language processing (NLP) tasks in the financial domain remain challenging due to the paucity of appropriately labelled data. Other issues that can limit task performance are differences in word distribution between the general corpora - typically used to pre-train language models - and financial corpora, which often exhibit specialized language and symbology. Here, we investigate two approaches that may help to mitigate these issues. Firstly, we experiment with further language model pre-training using large amounts of in-domain data from business and financial news. We then apply augmentation approaches to increase the size of our dataset for model fine-tuning. We report our findings on an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) controversies dataset and demonstrate that both approaches are beneficial to accuracy in classification tasks.
Learning Monocular Dense Depth from Events
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Event cameras are novel sensors that output brightness changes in the form of a stream of asynchronous events instead of intensity frames. Compared to conventional image sensors, they offer significant advantages: high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, no motion blur, and much lower bandwidth. Recently, learning-based approaches have been applied to event-based data, thus unlocking their potential and making significant progress in a variety of tasks, such as monocular depth prediction. Most existing approaches use standard feed-forward architectures to generate network predictions, which do not leverage the temporal consistency presents in the event stream. We propose a recurrent architecture to solve this task and show significant improvement over standard feed-forward methods. In particular, our method generates dense depth predictions using a monocular setup, which has not been shown previously. We pretrain our model using a new dataset containing events and depth maps recorded in the CARLA simulator. We test our method on the Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset (MVSEC). Quantitative experiments show up to 50% improvement in average depth error with respect to previous event-based methods.
On the surprising similarities between supervised and self-supervised models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

How do humans learn to acquire a powerful, flexible and robust representation of objects? While much of this process remains unknown, it is clear that humans do not require millions of object labels. Excitingly, recent algorithmic advancements in self-supervised learning now enable convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn useful visual object representations without supervised labels, too. In the light of this recent breakthrough, we here compare self-supervised networks to supervised models and human behaviour. We tested models on 15 generalisation datasets for which large-scale human behavioural data is available (130K highly controlled psychophysical trials). Surprisingly, current self-supervised CNNs share four key characteristics of their supervised counterparts: (1.) relatively poor noise robustness (with the notable exception of SimCLR), (2.) non-human category-level error patterns, (3.) non-human image-level error patterns (yet high similarity to supervised model errors) and (4.) a bias towards texture. Taken together, these results suggest that the strategies learned through today's supervised and self-supervised training objectives end up being surprisingly similar, but distant from human-like behaviour. That being said, we are clearly just at the beginning of what could be called a self-supervised revolution of machine vision, and we are hopeful that future self-supervised models behave differently from supervised ones, and---perhaps---more similar to robust human object recognition.
Deep Learning based Automated Forest Health Diagnosis from Aerial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Global climate change has had a drastic impact on our environment. Previous study showed that pest disaster occured from global climate change may cause a tremendous number of trees died and they inevitably became a factor of forest fire. An important portent of the forest fire is the condition of forests. Aerial image-based forest analysis can give an early detection of dead trees and living trees. In this paper, we applied a synthetic method to enlarge imagery dataset and present a new framework for automated dead tree detection from aerial images using a re-trained Mask RCNN (Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network) approach, with a transfer learning scheme. We apply our framework to our aerial imagery datasets,and compare eight fine-tuned models. The mean average precision score (mAP) for the best of these models reaches 54%. Following the automated detection, we are able to automatically produce and calculate number of dead tree masks to label the dead trees in an image, as an indicator of forest health that could be linked to the causal analysis of environmental changes and the predictive likelihood of forest fire.
SAIBERSOC: Synthetic Attack Injection to Benchmark and Evaluate the Performance of Security Operation Centers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we introduce SAIBERSOC, a tool and methodology enabling security researchers and operators to evaluate the performance of deployed and operational Security Operation Centers (SOCs) (or any other security monitoring infrastructure). The methodology relies on the MITRE ATT&CK Framework to define a procedure to generate and automatically inject synthetic attacks in an operational SOC to evaluate any output metric of interest (e.g., detection accuracy, time-to-investigation, etc.). To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, we devise an experiment with $n=124$ students playing the role of SOC analysts. The experiment relies on a real SOC infrastructure and assigns students to either a BADSOC or a GOODSOC experimental condition. Our results show that the proposed methodology is effective in identifying variations in SOC performance caused by (minimal) changes in SOC configuration. We release the SAIBERSOC tool implementation as free and open source software.
A New Open-Access Platform for Measuring and Sharing mTBI Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Despite numerous research efforts, the precise mechanisms of concussion have yet to be fully uncovered. Clinical studies on high-risk populations, such as contact sports athletes, have become more common and give insight on the link between impact severity and brain injury risk through the use of wearable sensors and neurological testing. However, as the number of institutions operating these studies grows, there is a growing need for a platform to share these data to facilitate our understanding of concussion mechanisms and aid in the development of suitable diagnostic tools. To that end, this paper puts forth two contributions: 1) a centralized, open-source platform for storing and sharing head impact data, in collaboration with the Federal Interagency Traumatic Brain Injury Research informatics system (FITBIR), and 2) a deep learning impact detection algorithm (MiGNet) to differentiate between true head impacts and false positives for the previously biomechanically validated instrumented mouthguard sensor (MiG2.0), all of which easily interfaces with FITBIR. We report 96% accuracy using MiGNet, based on a neural network model, improving on previous work based on Support Vector Machines achieving 91% accuracy, on an out of sample dataset of high school and collegiate football head impacts. The integrated MiG2.0 and FITBIR system serve as a collaborative research tool to be disseminated across multiple institutions towards creating a standardized dataset for furthering the knowledge of concussion biomechanics.
Latent Vector Recovery of Audio GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Advanced Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are remarkable in generating intelligible audio from a random latent vector. In this paper, we examine the task of recovering the latent vector of both synthesized and real audio. Previous works recovered latent vectors of given audio through an auto-encoder inspired technique that trains an encoder network either in parallel with the GAN or after the generator is trained. With our approach, we train a deep residual neural network architecture to project audio synthesized by WaveGAN into the corresponding latent space with near identical reconstruction performance. To accommodate for the lack of an original latent vector for real audio, we optimize the residual network on the perceptual loss between the real audio samples and the reconstructed audio of the predicted latent vectors. In the case of synthesized audio, the Mean Squared Error (MSE) between the ground truth and recovered latent vector is minimized as well. We further investigated the audio reconstruction performance when several gradient optimization steps are applied to the predicted latent vector. Through our deep neural network based method of training on real and synthesized audio, we are able to predict a latent vector that corresponds to a reasonable reconstruction of real audio. Even though we evaluated our method on WaveGAN, our proposed method is universal and can be applied to any other GANs.
Generalizable Machine Learning in Neuroscience using Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Although a number of studies have explored deep learning in neuroscience, the application of these algorithms to neural systems on a microscopic scale, i.e. parameters relevant to lower scales of organization, remains relatively novel. Motivated by advances in whole-brain imaging, we examined the performance of deep learning models on microscopic neural dynamics and resulting emergent behaviors using calcium imaging data from the nematode C. elegans. We show that neural networks perform remarkably well on both neuron-level dynamics prediction, and behavioral state classification. In addition, we compared the performance of structure agnostic neural networks and graph neural networks to investigate if graph structure can be exploited as a favorable inductive bias. To perform this experiment, we designed a graph neural network which explicitly infers relations between neurons from neural activity and leverages the inferred graph structure during computations. In our experiments, we found that graph neural networks generally outperformed structure agnostic models and excel in generalization on unseen organisms, implying a potential path to generalizable machine learning in neuroscience.
Predicting Playa Inundation Using a Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In the Great Plains, playas are critical wetland habitats for migratory birds and a source of recharge for the agriculturally-important High Plains aquifer. The temporary wetlands exhibit complex hydrology, filling rapidly via local rain storms and then drying through evaporation and groundwater infiltration. Using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to account for these complex processes, we modeled playa inundation for 71,842 playas in the Great Plains from 1984-2018. At the level of individual playas, the model achieved an F1-score of 0.538 on a withheld test set, displaying the ability to predict complex inundation patterns. When averaging over all the playas in the entire region, the model is able to very closely track inundation trends, even during periods of drought. Our results demonstrate potential for using LSTMs to model complex hydrological dynamics. Our modeling approach could be used to model playa inundation into the future under different climate scenarios to better understand how wetland habitats and groundwater will be impacted by changing climate.
DeepIntent: ImplicitIntent based Android IDS with E2E Deep Learning architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The Intent in Android plays an important role in inter-process and intra-process communications. The implicit Intent that an application could accept are declared in its manifest and are amongst the easiest feature to extract from an apk. Implicit Intents could even be extracted online and in real-time. So far neither the feasibility of developing an Intrusion Detection System solely on implicit Intent has been explored, nor are any benchmarks available of a malware classifier that is based on implicit Intent alone. We demonstrate that despite Intent is implicit and well declared, it can provide very intuitive insights to distinguish malicious from non-malicious applications. We conducted exhaustive experiments with over 40 different end-to-end Deep Learning configurations of Auto-Encoders and Multi-Layer-Perceptron to create a benchmark for a malware classifier that works exclusively on implicit Intent. Using the results from the experiments we create an intrusion detection system using only the implicit Intents and end-to-end Deep Learning architecture. We obtained an area-under-curve statistic of 0.81, and accuracy of 77.2% along with false-positive-rate of 0.11 on Drebin dataset.
Multimodal Speech Recognition with Unstructured Audio Masking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Visual context has been shown to be useful for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems when the speech signal is noisy or corrupted. Previous work, however, has only demonstrated the utility of visual context in an unrealistic setting, where a fixed set of words are systematically masked in the audio. In this paper, we simulate a more realistic masking scenario during model training, called RandWordMask, where the masking can occur for any word segment. Our experiments on the Flickr 8K Audio Captions Corpus show that multimodal ASR can generalize to recover different types of masked words in this unstructured masking setting. Moreover, our analysis shows that our models are capable of attending to the visual signal when the audio signal is corrupted. These results show that multimodal ASR systems can leverage the visual signal in more generalized noisy scenarios.
Adaptive Dense-to-Sparse Paradigm for Pruning Online Recommendation System with Non-Stationary Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Large scale deep learning provides a tremendous opportunity to improve the quality of content recommendation systems by employing both wider and deeper models, but this comes at great infrastructural cost and carbon footprint in modern data centers. Pruning is an effective technique that reduces both memory and compute demand for model inference. However, pruning for online recommendation systems is challenging due to the continuous data distribution shift (a.k.a non-stationary data). Although incremental training on the full model is able to adapt to the non-stationary data, directly applying it on the pruned model leads to accuracy loss. This is because the sparsity pattern after pruning requires adjustment to learn new patterns. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to provide in-depth analysis and discussion of applying pruning to online recommendation systems with non-stationary data distribution. Overall, this work makes the following contributions: 1) We present an adaptive dense to sparse paradigm equipped with a novel pruning algorithm for pruning a large scale recommendation system with non-stationary data distribution; 2) We design the pruning algorithm to automatically learn the sparsity across layers to avoid repeating hand-tuning, which is critical for pruning the heterogeneous architectures of recommendation systems trained with non-stationary data.
Combinatorics and Geometry for the Many-ported, Distributed and Shared Memory Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2020
Year: 2020

Manycore SoC architectures based on on-chip shared memory are preferred for flexible and programmable solutions in many application domains. However, the development of many ported memory is becoming increasingly challenging as we approach the end of Moore's Law while systems requirements demand larger shared memory and more access ports. Memory can no longer be designed simply to minimize single transaction access time, but must take into account the functionality on the SoC. In this paper we examine a common large memory usage in SoC, where the memory is used as storage for large buffers that are then moved for time scheduled processing. We merge two aspects of many ported memory design, combinatorial analysis of interconnect, and geometric analysis of critical paths, extending both to show that in this case the SoC performance benefits significantly from a hierarchical, distributed and staged architecture with lower-radix switches and fractal randomization of memory bank addressing, along with judicious and geometry aware application of speed up. The results presented show the new architecture supports 20% higher throughput with 20% lower latency and 30% less interconnection area at approximately the same power consumption. We demonstrate the flexibility and scalability of this architecture on silicon from a physical design perspective by taking the design through layout. The architecture enables a much easier implementation flow that works well with physically irregular port access and memory dominant layout, which is a common issue in real designs.
A Systematic Approach to Computing the Manipulator Jacobian and Hessian using the Elementary Transform Sequence
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

The elementary transform sequence (ETS) provides a universal method of describing the kinematics of any serial-link manipulator. The ETS notation is intuitive and easy to understand, while avoiding the complexity and limitations of Denvit-Hartenberg frame assignment. In this paper, we describe a systematic method for computing the manipulator Jacobian and Hessian (differential kinematics) using the ETS notation. Differential kinematics have many applications including numerical inverse kinematics, resolved-rate motion control and manipulability motion control. Furthermore, we provide an open-source Python library which implements our algorithm and can be interfaced with any serial-link manipulator (available at github.com/petercorke/robotics-toolbox-python).
Robust Face Alignment by Multi-order High-precision Hourglass Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Heatmap regression (HR) has become one of the mainstream approaches for face alignment and has obtained promising results under constrained environments. However, when a face image suffers from large pose variations, heavy occlusions and complicated illuminations, the performances of HR methods degrade greatly due to the low resolutions of the generated landmark heatmaps and the exclusion of important high-order information that can be used to learn more discriminative features. To address the alignment problem for faces with extremely large poses and heavy occlusions, this paper proposes a heatmap subpixel regression (HSR) method and a multi-order cross geometry-aware (MCG) model, which are seamlessly integrated into a novel multi-order high-precision hourglass network (MHHN). The HSR method is proposed to achieve high-precision landmark detection by a well-designed subpixel detection loss (SDL) and subpixel detection technology (SDT). At the same time, the MCG model is able to use the proposed multi-order cross information to learn more discriminative representations for enhancing facial geometric constraints and context information. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore heatmap subpixel regression for robust and high-precision face alignment. The experimental results from challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the literature.